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This course examines social conflicts and political controversies in American culture through the lens of visual art and photography. We consider how visual images both reflect and participate in the social and political life of the nation and how the terms of citizenship have been represented¿and, at times, contested¿by artists throughout the first half of the 20th century. The class explores the relation between American art and the body politic by focusing on issues of poverty, war, censorship, consumerism, class identity, and racial division.

| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-ED

ARTHIST 147:MODERNISM AND MODERNITY (ARTHIST 347)

The development of modern art and visual culture in Europe and the US, beginning with Paris in the 1860s, the period of Haussmann, Baudelaire and Manet, and ending with the Bauhaus and Surrealism in the 1920s and 30s. Modernism in art, architecture and design (e.g., Gauguin, Picasso, Duchamp, Mondrian, Le Corbusier, Breuer, Dali) will be explored as a compelling dream of utopian possibilities involving multifaceted and often ambivalent, even contradictory responses to the changes brought about by industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of mass culture.

ARTHIST 152:The American West (AMSTUD 124A, ENGLISH 124, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A)

The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North America: its history, physical geography, climate, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, demography, economy, and continuing policy challenges. Students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region: time, space, water, peoples, and boom and bust cycles.

An exploration of the dynamic relationship between technology and the ways we see and represent the world. The course examines technologies from the Renaissance through the present day, from telescopes and microscopes to digital detectors, that have changed and enhanced our visual capabilities as well as shaped how we imagine the world. We also consider how these technologies influenced and inspired the work of artists. Special attention is paid to how different technologies such as linear perspective, photography, cinema, and computer screens translate the visual experience into a representation; the automation of vision; and the intersection of technology with conceptions of time and space.

The complex and interdependent relationship between fashion and art. Topics include: the ways in which artists have used fashion in different art forms as a means to convey social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer; the interplay between fashion designers and various art movements, especially in the 20th century; the place of prints, photography, and the Internet in fashion, in particular how different media shape how clothes are seen and perceived. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.

Last offered: Winter 2014
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

ARTHIST 176:Feminism and Contemporary Art (ARTHIST 376)

(Same as
ARTHIST 176) The impact of second wave feminism on art making and art historical practice in the 70s, and its reiteration and transformation in contemporary feminist work. Topics: sexism and art history, feminist studio programs in the 70s, essentialism and self-representation, themes of domesticity, the body in feminist art making, bad girls, the exclusion of women of color and lesbians from the art historical mainstream, notions of performativity.

| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender

ARTHIST 178:Ethnicity and Dissent in United States Art and Literature (AMSTUD 178, ARTHIST 378)

The role of the visual arts of the U.S. in the construction and contesting of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Focus is on artists and writers from the 18th century to 1990s. How power, domination, and resistance work historically. Topics include: minstrelsy and the invention of race; mass culture and postmodernity; hegemony and language; memory and desire; and the borderlands.

| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-ED

ARTHIST 203:Greek Art In and Out of Context (CLASSICS 163)

The seminar considers Greek artifacts in the context of Greek life (including the life of the workshop), and the endless ways in which craftsmen served the needs of Greek society. Their foundries, factories and ceramic studios produced the material goods that defined Greek life: temples, statues and other offerings for the gods; arms and armor for warriors; sporting equipment and prizes for athletes; houses, clothing and crockery for the family; ships and sailcloth, wagons and ploughs, wine and oil-presses for a thriving domestic and overseas economy; gravestones and funeral vases for the dead. (Formerly
CLASSART 109.) nMost of the antiquities exhibited in museums, or purchased by private collectors from galleries and auction houses, survive because they were buried with people who used and cherished them. The Greeks¿ belief that the artifacts they valued in life would serve them in the afterlife informs the second part of the seminar, which is devoted to the recent history of tomb looting and the illicit trafficking in antiquities.

ARTHIST 208:Hagia Sophia (CLASSICS 173)

By employing a methodology based in psychoacoustics, semiotics, and phenomenology, this course explores the relationship among sound, water, marble, meaning, and religious experience in the sixth-century church of HagianSophia built by emperor Justinian in Constantinople. We will read medieval sources describing the interior and ritual, make short movies exploring the shimmer of marble in buildings on campus, and study the acoustics of domed buildings through computer auralization done at Stanford's CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics)

Last offered: Winter 2013
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

ARTHIST 212:Renaissance Florence, 1440-1540

Notions of cultural superiority in light of changes in Florentine society as it went from being a republic to a duchy ruled by the Medici. Artists and architects such as Donatello, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Pontormo praised as having revived the arts and returned them to a level of ancient splendor. The role of the sacred in daily life and uses of the pagan past for poetic and scholarly expressions and as vehicles for contemporary experience.